About Us

Dr Zuhair Bandar

Chief Artificial Intelligence Scientist

Dr Zuhair Bandar is the inventor of Silent Talker as an adaptive psychological profiling system, and has pioneered its development for the past two decades, both as Reader at the Manchester Metropolitan University supervising research post-graduates and latterly as Chief AI Scientist at the company, overseeing its realisation as a fully functional commercial entity. He is also founder of the Intelligent Systems Group at the Manchester Metropolitan University. Dr Zuhair Bandar has a wide range of experience in applying Artificial Intelligence in industrial applications. He has been involved in AI research for over 40 years spanning a wide range of specialist areas including Neural Networks, Machine Learning, Conversational Agents and Fuzzy Decision Algorithms. He has published more than 70 articles in refereed journals and international conference proceedings.

Dr James O'Shea

Senior Artificial Intelligence Scientist

Dr. O’Shea offers 18 years of experience to his role as co-founder and consultant for the Silent Talker team. Dr. O’Shea helped develop, test, and patent the proprietary Silent Talker software. He has earned degrees in Chemistry and Artificial Intelligence. In addition to his work with Silent Talker, Dr. O’Shea holds concurrent affiliations as a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science at Manchester Metropolitan University and Editorial Board Member for the International Journal of Intelligent Defense Support Systems. He organized and chaired the 2011 international conference Agent and Multi-Agent Systems: Technologies and Applications in Manchester, UK. With more than 60 publications in international scientific Journals, book chapters and peer-reviewed conferences, Dr. O’Shea is a leading expert in adaptive psychological profiling, dialogue systems and computational intelligence. He is also an expert in applying these systems both in English and with resource-poor languages such as Arabic, Urdu, and Thai. Dr. O’Shea has led or contributed to projects funded by Horizon 2020 and the DTI (Artificial Intelligence and Software Engineering technology transfer). He is an enthusiastic science communicator including developing young scientists through Research Placements funded by the Nuffield Foundation. He is currently a co-investigator on the H2020 funded project iBorderCtrl – Intelligent Smart Border Control and is initiating research projects on Automatic Semantic Deception Detection. He is a member of the IEEE and a lifetime gold member of the Knowledge Engineering Society.

Dr Keeley A Crockett

Senior Artificial Intelligence Scientist

Dr Keeley Crockett is a Reader in Computational intelligence at Manchester Metropolitan University. She has over 20 years’ experience of research and development in computational intelligence algorithms and applications including the using of artificial intelligence algorithms for psychological profiling system within deception (Silent Talker) and comprehension (FATHOM). She is one of the principal investigators on the H2020 European project iBorderCtrl and a member of the new IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Task Force on Ethical and Social Implications of Computational Intelligence. She is the current Chair of IEEE Women in Engineering UKI and Vice Chair IEEE Women in Computational Intelligence. She has authored/ co-authored over 90 peer reviewed papers in the field of computational intelligence.